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W.H. 'disappointed' by asylum

Ex-CIA chief: Snowden worse than Manning

The United States is constantly evaluating Putin’s status and how to approach him, balancing public pronouncements that the Russians immediately reject out of pride with quiet communications that tend to be more effective. On any given day, lower level officials in Moscow and Washington are sharing intelligence and negotiating over collaborative efforts, while others are finding new ways to insult and score points off each other.

That’s why the White House spent weeks immediately undercutting their stern warnings about releasing Snowden by acknowledging that they weren’t going to let much happen if Russia didn’t pay attention.

Even in the context of a relationship White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday was “complicated, and currently faced with a lot of disagreements,” though, Snowden’s release creates a whole new set of problems.

Obama risks looking weak and not in control. But the problem is, he’s not the only one with a problem: Russia experts say Putin looks like he’s miscalculated his way into an important blunder for his presidency, that’s only boiling the borscht hotter.

In other words, the way things go in contemporary U.S.-Russia relations.

“What we’re seeing is a Russian president who has increasingly committed to a foreign policy that is based largely on zero-sum calculations: we win, you lose; you lose, we win — which is the exact opposite of the U.S.-Russian relationship in the decade after the Cold War,” said Strobe Talbott, a Russia veteran who’s now president of the Brookings Institution and chairman of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. “Win-win on the Russian side seems to be now an inoperative concept.”

Putin didn’t invite Snowden to come to Moscow, and once the NSA leaker was there, he seized on the opportunity to score some points, even while expressing ambivalence as only the language of Chekhov allows—the situation was like “shearing a pig: lots of screams, but little wool.”

But by granting Snowden asylum, Putin’s escalated what started out as, essentially, an international diplomacy-version of a prank into l’affaire Snowden. He wanted to show the U.S. submissive to him in trying to get their criminal back. But what he’s probably done is lead Obama to cancel his respect-paying visit to Moscow in September — where Putin is hoping to be the poobah, graciously receiving the American president for all the photos and the symbolism.

Things were going to get worse without Snowden, but he’s helped accelerate the process. Instead of tanks rolling out or jets scrambling over the White Sea, though, people who’ve been involved with Russia-U.S. relations for years see this as another sign of diplomatic relations heading into a frustrated détente, as Putin expands his hold on Russia and Obama—and probably a few presidents to come — calibrate how to react to a man who’s as likely to send helicopters to Bashar Assad as steal a Superbowl ring.

This isn’t the 1950s or ‘60s, when despite hundreds of nuclear warheads aimed at each other there were very open lines of communication between Washington and Moscow that kept any of those warheads from ever being used. This isn’t the early 1990s, when a young new Russian government felt submissive to the United States. And this isn’t 2008, when there were conversations in the Bush White House about possible military intervention in Russia’s war with Georgia.

But what’s clear every day is that the two countries haven’t achieved the rose-strewn “reset” that was promised when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered that oversize prop button to the Russian foreign minister back in 2009.

Putin has shown little interest in that. Even as the United States and Russia sort through their intertwined arrangements over missile defense, terrorist tracking, disarmament, Syria and Iran, he’s used his grandstanding against the United States to try to establish himself as a more dominant player on the world stage and in using his international brinksmanship to beat up the opposition.

“The two countries have very different conceptions of their places in the world and what the world should be about, but they are both too important to one or another to be able to walk out of the relationship — and yet the differences are too big for the relationship to be a comfortable one,” said Blair Ruble, a Russia expert who’s the former director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center.

More than he’s done to recalibrate Americans’ views on surveillance, Snowden — whom just about everyone in Washington and Moscow knows Putin probably would have locked away and eventually killed — had he been a Russian who’d leaked secret — has become a reason for Republicans and Democrats both in Congress to recall one area of longstanding bipartisan agreement: they all hate Russia.